Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Pepys had another year at school, some of it spent negotiating his entrance to the university of Cambridge. Sam was a good bit older than many undergraduates: fourteen was quite usual, but he did not start his Cambridge studies until he was eighteen. There was no question of his father financing him, so he had to find support in other places. It came from some powerful Cromwellians. George Downing’s part in the award of his first exhibition in February 1650 has already been mentioned. Five months after this Pepys’s name was entered at Trinity Hall. This was the college of his great-uncle Talbot Pepys, now recorder, or chief magistrate, of Cambridge and very active in raising taxes for Cromwell’s army.42 Talbot was also Edward Montagu’s uncle. Trinity Hall was a legal college, so there may have been thought of Sam becoming a lawyer. But that plan was given up – he may have disliked the idea, or it may have been too expensive to pursue – and the place at Trinity Hall was not taken up. He was admitted instead, in October, to Magdalene College. As it happened, Magdalene had just lost its master who, summoned to London to take the ‘Engagement’ of loyalty to the commonwealth by the commission for the universities, refused on grounds of conscience. His offer to live quietly was not good enough and he was replaced. The newly appointed master was John Sadler, another successful lawyer in Chancery, a town clerk of London, much favoured by Cromwell, who had already offered him the position of chief justice of Munster, which he turned down. As it happened, Sadler lived in Salisbury Court.43 Montagu’s patronage probably came into it too; his chaplain had a Magdalene connection, and Samuel Morland, who claimed his friendship, had just been appointed to a fellowship there and became Pepys’s tutor. Later, Morland and Downing were both chosen by Cromwell to go on diplomatic missions, and he appointed Colonel Edward Montagu as visitor to both Cambridge and Oxford, although he had attended neither university. The appointment made him responsible for inspecting, supervising and removing abuses from the universities.

  Oxford and Cambridge were obvious battlegrounds for the minds of the younger generation, and seen as such by the government. There was talk in parliament of abolishing both universities and setting up alternative ones in other cities – York, London and Durham were all mentioned – and although these ideas were dropped, the purging of the old guard of Oxbridge masters and fellows was vigorously pursued. It was necessary to build up a body of graduates sympathetic to the commonwealth, something that helps to explain why Sam Pepys, with his proclaimed views and politically correct connections, was thought worth helping. In November he was awarded a second leaving exhibition by St Paul’s, and within a month of starting his studies at Cambridge he picked up another scholarship.

  3. Cambridge and Clerking

  Cambridge is a cold and beautiful place, and was certainly as cold and possibly as beautiful in the 1650s as it is today. But Evelyn did not enthuse when he came in 1654 to see the great colleges, St John’s, Trinity and King’s, on to whose chapel roof he ascended to survey the views of Ely, Royston, Newmarket and many miles of field and fenland stretching to the horizon; the town was, he said, ‘situated in a low dirty unpleasant place, the streetes ill paved, the aire thick, as infested by the fenns’. He observed that Clare College was being elegantly rebuilt to a ‘new and noble design’, but that the work had been brought to a halt by the war; and he did not so much as mention Magdalene, perhaps because it was out of the way, the only college set on the north side of the River Cam, where the Huntingdon road started.1 Originally built for Benedictine monks, it was one of the smallest and least well-endowed foundations; but the modest red-brick court of two storeys, topped by attics with dormer windows, was and still is attractive, with its riverside gardens and, in Pepys’s time, open country beyond.

  Pepys, at eighteen short, dark, with slightly protruding eyes and fleshy cheeks, nose and lips, finally put on his Cambridge gown at Magdalene in March 1651.2 He was not going to impress his fellow students by either his looks or his social standing, since he went as a sizar, that is, a student whose teaching is paid for by the college; one shilling and sixpence a week seems to have been the rate. Undergraduate numbers were in any case low because of the war. When Pepys arrived there were only thirty in residence in the college, and he was one of eleven freshmen. Each of them had to put in £5.5s. a year towards their ‘commons’ – shared provisions – and pay twelve shillings a year for washing and ten shillings for his bed-maker, who had to be either a man or an old woman, since young women were formally forbidden entry to any college.3 Here was the smell of an all-male community, and with minimal washing arrangements. Pepys mentions more than one of his Cambridge ‘chamber fellows’ in his Diary, and there are still sets of rooms in the oldest part of Magdalene that show how things were arranged, with bedrooms and living rooms shared but separate rooms for study: work at least was seen as a private activity. The day started with chapel at six; the new master had moved it forward from five, as much for his own sake as the scholars’, no doubt. Breakfast followed, then classes all morning, and dinner at noon in the college hall. Until 1643 Magdalene’s chapel and hall were embellished by forty ‘superstitious pictures’, including a piece of old stained glass in which ‘Joseph and Mary stood to be espoused in the Windowes’, something we know about from records kept by the enthusiastic vandal who destroyed them in 1643, following an edict from parliament.4

  College rules were strict, in theory at any rate. The young men were not allowed to wander about the Cambridge streets or linger in the market place, and certainly not to enter taverns. As at school, they were expected to talk together in Latin, or Greek, or Hebrew. They were forbidden to play cards or dice, or to have irreligious books in their rooms, or to attend dances, boxing matches or cock-fights; and they were not officially allowed anywhere near the famous Sturbridge Fair that was set up in an encampment of booths and tents every September outside the town. It had existed before the university, and it brought trade and visitors from all over Europe. Wool, wine, tin, lead, hops and linen were the serious business, but there were secondhand bookstalls too, haberdashery and even fish for sale; and it attracted numerous ‘vagabonds, naughtie and joly persons’.5 The university was at the height of its puritanism when Pepys was there, and, although he was a good student, he managed to be reprimanded formally for drunkenness at least once. The college register for 21 October 1653 reads, in the hand of the registrary, John Wood, ‘Peapys & Hind were solemnely admonished by mys[elf] & Mr Hill for having bene scandalously overseene in drink the night before; This was done in the presence of all the fellowes then resident in Mr Hills chamber.’ That is all we know of his drinking history at the university. Less heroically, he used to purchase stewed prunes from a woman known as Goody Mulliner living opposite Magdalene, whose son served – and perhaps sometimes overserved – in the college buttery, where the students went to buy ale as well as food.

  Sam, who never enjoyed single-sex living, also hung about various young women, including Betty Archer, whom he remembered tenderly, and her sister Mary, who married a college friend. There was also the less respectable Elizabeth Aynsworth, who kept an inn and taught him a very lewd song called ‘Full Forty Times Over’; she was later banished from Cambridge.6 And if he did not own any irreligious books, he wrote one, or part of one, in the shape of a novel or romance that he called ‘Love a Cheate.’ Maddeningly for us, he destroyed his own manuscript ten years later in a fit of tidiness, or ‘humour of making all things even and clear in the world’; worse, in ‘reading it over tonight, I liked it very well and wondered a little at myself at my vein at that time when I wrote it, doubting that I cannot do so well now if I would try’.7 The disappearance of this first evidence of Pepys’s literary ambition, and of his early narrative voice, is lamentable; but it is worth knowing that he was trying his hand at fiction when he was twenty, because it tells us that the skills displayed in the Diary were built on something he had already worked at. He also enjoyed playing games with words, anagrams, for instance, on the names of young women he admired, including
one Elizabeth Whittle living in Salisbury Court, where she lodged in a house belonging to another Montagu connection. If Pepys’s anagrams were meant to woo, they failed to soften her heart towards him, and in 1654 she married an able young man, Stephen Fox, with whom he had friendly professional dealings later.8

  Shorthand was another extracurricular enthusiasm. Thomas Shelton’s Short Writing, first published in 1626, had been improved and renamed Tachygraphy, and was republished by the Cambridge University Press in 1635. It was not too difficult to master, and there was something of a craze for it among young men and women who used it for taking notes on sermons; there were two reprints during the pious and talkative 1640s.9 It looks as though Pepys learnt it during his undergraduate years, because by the time he started to use it for his Diary he was a practised shorthand writer, although there is no evidence that he took down sermons. Shelton’s system uses a symbol for each consonant and double consonant, as well as for many suffixes and prefixes; the vowels are indicated by positioning the following consonant or by a dot in one of five places; and there are 300 whole word symbols to be memorized – e.g., the symbol for the letter g is also the symbol for the word God, the symbol for k also stands for king and l for lord. lt is not a fast system by the standards of later shorthand, but, although Pepys used it on occasion to take down speech, speed was not his object in the Diary.10

  Students usually took eight or nine weeks’ holiday in the summer, when Pepys would have gone home to Salisbury Court, and might remain in residence for the rest of the year.11 The official Cambridge curriculum had for centuries concentrated on logic, philosophy and rhetoric, but under the commonwealth the dominance of puritan teaching meant that the classical curriculum was pushed aside by many in favour of religious studies. Oliver Heywood, a Trinity contemporary of Pepys, described how his ‘time and thoughts were more employed in practical divinity’ and how he preferred the sermons of Calvinist preachers and prayers in his tutor’s rooms to the study of Aristotle and Plato. He and his friends were more inclined to read the works of English divines, and he names Sibbes, Perkins, Bolton and Preston. The titles of their books indicate their preoccupations: A Garden of Spiritual Flowers; The Saint’s Cordials; A Treatise of Mans Imaginations, Showing His Naturall Evill Thoughts; The Sinfulnesse of Sin; An Elegant Description of Spiritual Life and Death; and Sinnes Overthrow, or a Treatise of Mortification.12 I doubt if Pepys spent much time with these. He preferred Bacon and Erasmus among modern writers, Cicero among the ancients, and was keenly interested in English history. Rhetoric came naturally to him, and he is likely to have performed well at the disputations required of students, which involved formal public debates on subjects such as ‘Was Julius Caesar justly put to death?’ or ‘Whether a lettered or an unlettered wife be preferable?’. There were also declamations to be prepared. These were the equivalent of the modern weekly essay, papers to be read aloud, in Latin and ideally larded with quotations from classical authors diligently collected by the student in a commonplace book.13 Grammar and ethics, the latter involving some study of history, must also have been to Sam’s taste. Poetry too, whether ancient or modern. John Dryden, already with a reputation for his verse, was an acquaintance – he was at Trinity, where he got into trouble for ‘contumacy’, much as you might expect of a young poet – and later in life he and Pepys corresponded and shared an admiration for Chaucer.14 Then there was music, always pre-eminent for Pepys. Although King’s College Chapel had lost its organ and choristers to the puritan ban on such delights, there was still domestic music to be made. A family of musicians called Saunders lived in Green Street in the centre of town, and Pepys referred to one of the Saunderses later as ‘the only Viallin in my time’. On another occasion he talked of meeting ‘Mr Nicholson, my old fellow-student at Magdalen, and we played three or four things upon violin and Basse’, which suggests they were continuing an established practice.15 There is a story of a Cambridge student taking his viol into a philosophy class and defending the position of ‘sol, fa, mi, la’ against three opponents, whom he routed, at which the teacher exclaimed, ‘Ubi desinit philosophus, ibi incipit musicus’ meaning, roughly, that music begins where philosophy ends. If he heard of it, it must have pleased Pepys, who always insisted on the importance of musical studies.16

  He was a good walker too, and it is hard not to think he made the fourteen-mile walk to Brampton and Hinchingbrooke several times during his time at Cambridge, to see his uncle Robert and to pay his respects to my Lady – Jemima Montagu – now with four small children tumbling about her skirts. After little Jem came Edward, then Paulina, and, in July 1650, Sidney. But nothing is known of such visits, only of much shorter Cambridge walks. He took pleasure, he said, in going frequently to Chesterton church – St Andrew’s, with its Doomsday painting above the chancel arch – and on to the ruined remains of Barnwell Abbey on the Newmarket road, then across the river with the ferry, and so back along Jesus Lane.17 Another walk, clearly etched in his memory because of its after-effects, was made with a group of friends who set out in good spirits on a sweltering summer’s day to what they chose to call Aristotle’s Well. Pepys, always sensitive to heat, gulped down such quantities of its cold water that the sheer weight in his system, he believed, gave him several exceedingly unpleasant days before a stone was washed out of his kidney and into his bladder. The result was that his already painful condition became worse. From then on, he wrote, ‘I lived under a constant succession of fits of stone in the bladder’. His account, which describes how he put up with the condition for several years after leaving Cambridge, until the pain became more than he could bear, suggests that his student days were not all busy, cheerful activity, declamations, drinking, music-making and reading, but had their darker side too. There was always a degree of pain to be dealt with, and days and nights when it flared up and he suffered miserably in the room he shared with his chamber fellows. Bladder problems and the passing of bloody water are uncomfortable, humiliating and frightening. Pepys depended on his charm and conviviality to make and keep friends at Cambridge; the fact that he had a chronic illness makes it the more striking that he kept up his spirits and his friendships as he did.

  His great-uncle Talbot Pepys, the Cambridge family connection, was less important in the university than in the town, where his position as recorder gave him considerable influence and control over civil and criminal jurisdiction. He had been its MP three decades earlier; now he was in his sixties and married to his fourth wife, with grown-up sons who had followed him into the law; and he was still very active. He lived in the large manor house at Impington, a few miles north of Cambridge, where Pepys noted that the country people all rose to their feet respectfully as his uncle Talbot entered the church. His political stance is perfectly clear, since he was a leading figure in the raising of taxes to finance Cromwell’s armies during the 1640s and 1650s. He was also appointed to a body meant to ensure that there was ‘godly and religious’ – meaning puritan – preaching in the non-university churches of the area.18

  In the 1650s the university felt the force of Cromwell’s will. During Sam’s college years the earl of Manchester was dismissed as chancellor for refusing to take the oath of loyalty to the commonwealth and replaced by Lord Chief Justice Oliver St John, a Huntingdon man who happened to be married to Cromwell’s cousin. This was in the autumn of 1651, and the following May Cromwell himself became high steward of Cambridge. It was a good thing for the university, because he wrote a stern letter forbidding the quartering of troops on the colleges.19 In 1654 his son Henry Cromwell became MP for Cambridge. Sam Pepys had only to look about to see how thoroughly everything was being reorganized, opponents got rid of, key positions filled by supporters of the new system, and good behaviour rewarded. This may have been the biggest lesson of his college years, that the world is changed by efficient administrators. When he completed his studies in the mid 1650s, the legal system, the headships of the once royalist colleges, the curriculum, Church appointments and the rai
sing of taxes were all in the hands of Cromwellians; it was just after he left that Colonel Edward Montagu was appointed to the powerful position of visitor to both universities, along with Sir Gilbert Pickering and Bulstrode Whitelocke.20

  What could Pepys expect once he had a degree? The majority of his contemporaries were bound for careers in the Church – Charles Carter, John Powell, Theophilus Hooke, John Castell, Richard Cumberland, Clement Sankey, Thomas Meriton, all of whose names can be gleaned from the Diary – but the Church clearly made no appeal to him. So little religious feeling did he possess that even at Cambridge he took the sacrament only ‘Once or twice’ – he was not sure which – and then not again for more than ten years.21 Charles Anderson, one of his high-spirited chamber fellows, went on to become a doctor, as did John Hollins. Others progressed to the law, including Robert Sawyer, another who shared rooms with Pepys.22 Sam’s lack of interest in a legal career is puzzling because it was such an obvious path to success for someone in his situation, poor and able. Instead, after being awarded another scholarship in October 1653, during his last year as a student, and taking his ΒA degree in March 1654, it appears that he simply went home to his parents. He was not offered a fellowship. It may be that the problems with his health were barring his ambitions; he had little to say later about this period of his life, and this could be as much to do with illness as a wish to gloss over his lowly and uncertain start on a London career. What is certain is that he was proud of having been at Cambridge, and was always pleased to return and show off its sights to others – his wife, his friends, even his maidservants.